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Can Foundation Models Be Trusted? A Scoping Review of Interpretability, Hallucination, Uncertainty, Alignment, Evaluation, and Human Oversight
Foundation models have expanded the scope of artificial intelligence by supporting language generation, multimodal reasoning, knowledge-intensive assistance, decision support, and adaptable downstream applications. Their broad capabilities, however, do not establish that their outputs, explanations, internal processes, or deployment arrangements are trustworthy. This scoping review maps the research landscape concerning foundation-model trustworthiness across interpretability, explanation capabilities, hallucination, uncertainty, reliability, alignment, evaluation, and human oversight. The review uses structured search concepts, eligibility principles, evidence extraction, and dimension-based mapping to examine how peer-reviewed scholarship characterizes foundation models as general-purpose intelligent systems and how trustworthiness evidence is distributed across technical, human-centered, organizational, and governance domains. The synthesis indicates that interpretability methods can expose selected behavioral or representational features but do not independently demonstrate explanation fidelity, usefulness, or safety. Hallucination and factuality research identifies persistent risks involving fabrication, unsupported claims, weak grounding, and persuasive misinformation, while uncertainty methods remain constrained by calibration, context shift, and user-communication challenges. Alignment and post-training techniques may shape preferred behaviors but retain risks associated with proxy objectives, preference representation, and residual failure. Benchmarking, human evaluation, stress testing, and oversight provide partial evidence, yet their value depends on construct validity, domain relevance, intervention capacity, accountability, and lifecycle monitoring. The research landscape is therefore fragmented across disciplines and frequently model-centred rather than socio-technical. Key priorities include stronger foundation-model interpretability validation, consistent hallucination measurement, usable uncertainty communication, externally valid evaluation, meaningful oversight testing, multimodal analysis, and lifecycle governance. The review contributes an integrated evidence map while emphasizing that no single trustworthiness dimension certifies safety, reliability, accountability, or deployment readiness.
Journal of Trustworthy and Explainable Intelligent Systems
Review | Open access | 15 March 2026 | Article: 80

Ground, Qualify, Verify, and Abstain—A Safety Framework for Hallucination Control, Evidence Grounding, Uncertainty Communication, and Decision Boundaries in Generative AI
Generative artificial intelligence can produce fluent, context-sensitive, and apparently authoritative responses even when relevant knowledge is incomplete, evidence is unavailable, or generated claims are false. This creates an epistemic safety problem concerning not only what a system produces, but also what it appears to know, how its claims are supported, how uncertainty is expressed, and when answering should be limited. This article develops a conceptual safety framework organized around four operational principles: ground, qualify, verify, and abstain. The framework treats hallucination as a multidimensional risk involving fabrication, factuality failure, groundedness failure, unsupported claims, false confidence, source and context errors, reasoning errors, citation errors, overgeneralization, confabulation, speculative output, and incomplete evidence. Grounding links material claims to relevant and sufficiently reliable evidence; qualification communicates uncertainty, assumptions, scope, and evidential limitations; verification examines claims, sources, citations, and inferential consistency; and abstention enables refusal, deferral, escalation, or constrained output when evidence or system competence is insufficient. Human review, meaningful oversight, decision boundaries, failure containment, incident monitoring, and lifecycle updating operate across these principles rather than functioning as final guarantees. The main contribution is an integrated generative AI safety framework that connects output-level hallucination control with source quality, knowledge verification, uncertainty communication, review quality, response limitation, and downstream risk containment. The framework is intended to structure domain-specific assessment and future research. It does not independently establish factual reliability, ethical sufficiency, legal compliance, operational safety, certification, or deployment readiness.
Journal of Trustworthy and Explainable Intelligent Systems
Original Research | Open access | 15 March 2026 | Article: 85